Saturday, August 31, 2013

Sarah Nasby's Without Words opens Wednesday, September 4th, at Art Metropole. The display of new multiples includes italicized stationery "for emphatic thoughts or a positive slant": hand drawn lined and graph paper, books, notepads and post-it notes. The works will be on view until September 28th.

For more information, visit Art Metropole, here and the artist's site, here.

Friday, August 30, 2013

A week before the closing of their Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition (20 July – 8 September 201),
Arnolfini is hosting an "Ian Hamilton Finlay Weekend". Friday August 30th and Saturday the 31st will feature talks, film screenings, performances and readings around the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

The three model boats on view in the exhibition (see above) will be auctioned off in support of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay and to help maintain Finlay’s garden Little Sparta in Stonypath, Scotland. George Ferguson, the Mayor of Bristol, will serve as auctioneer. The garden has been called Finlay's "greatest work of art". For more information, visit their site, here.

Full schedule below:

Friday 30 August

6pm Graham Rich: A Visual Correspondence, talk

6.45pm Beatrice Gibson: The Tiger's Mind (2013), film screening and in conversation

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Paintings and Belt Buckles, by Cary Leibowitz opens a week from tomorrow at Invisible Exports in NYC. It is his first solo exhibition at the gallery, and their first show at the new location on Eldridge Street. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8pm on Friday the 6th of September, and the show runs until October 13th.

Press release below:

Cary Leibowitz is stressed out. A painter and multimedia artist, Leibowitz presents everyday experience not as objects of reverence but occasions for scrutiny and absurdity—focusing particularly on the tangle of ritual rivalry and casual hypocrisy that surrounds social performance. The works confound and entertain at once, idiosyncratic and inscrutable both, layered with self-loathing but directed outward in search of like-minded communities, however small.

For three decades now, Leibowitz has made phantasmic and trenchant use of a comic persona of querulous self-abasement, with work that mixes elements of therapy, interrogation, social and institutional critique, and stand-up comedy routine. He first came to prominence in the early 1990s, as Candy Ass, a small-is-beautiful prankster-critic of neo-expressionist grandiosity, and enjoyed a New York revival in the early 2000s, as a wry and disconsolate Abject Art witness to the new pop-spectacle of the time. But these are public roles; and while his work demands them, Cary is a private artist, even cripplingly so, his unmistakable work the product of a riveting and consistent practice — driven by anxieties, neuroses, and premonitions of difference — that transforms self-doubt and social skepticism into something much larger than niche art-world critique: a heartrending and intimate meditation on our inescapable secret doubleness, the lacerating, manipulative and above all debilitatingly self-aware conscience that lies always beneath, or behind, or just around the corner, with a mocking wink. Or is it a knowing one?

In his belt buckles, Leibowitz presents, with a "dress-up" or "make believe" accessory, a rococo pre-adolescent view of the adult world—naive mementos forged from the wondrous, theatrical perspective of a child gazing up at those operating and interacting on a plane entirely above his head. Fantastical and autobiographical both, these are sentimental objects—valentines to an imagined and sturdy-seeming social universe one longs to be, but is not yet, a part of. That is, if it is possible to ever encounter that self-assured adult world anywhere outside of childlike fantasy.

The paintings, candy-colored, cheeky text-based canvases, are sly records of arbitrary rigor and anxious restraint—the uneasy effort of controlling and choreographing oneself through environments and interactions governed by rules that seem at least mercurial and unnatural, often impossible to navigate. While the varied and nonstandard shapes of his canvases are a kind of gestural flourish, it is the only one Leibowitz allows himself. His choice of a single consistent color on each canvas and the walls (the same sweet taffy shade of pink), and his use of comic language (the inviolably structured language of sharply formulated jokes, self-mocking gags, and put-downs), reflect an almost desperate program of self-management and self-restraint—qualities that often pass for self-knowledge even though they arise from self-doubt. One may never lose the sense that adulthood is a foreign language, and selfhood a fiction, even as one learns, blunder-by-blunder and crib-note-by-crib-note, how to mimic the first and mime the second. But even in a panic state, Leibowitz says, if you know what works for you, you can't slip.

For Leibowitz, childlike wonderment and adult anxiety are expressive modes as much as they are stages of growth, perennial gestures to be toggled between as much as snake-skins to be left behind. Abjection is no different—a declaration of morose independence from a self-congratulatory marketplace, a retreat into self-loathing as a break from self-promotion, self-loathing may not be the defeat that our self-help everything-is-sunnily-for-sale culture insists it is, but a vital platform for criticism both within and without. And possibly a perpetual state.

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Cary Leibowitz (b. 1963) also known as Candy Ass, is an American artist whose work has shown in museums and institutions across the globe including the Jewish Museum, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; PS1 MoMA, New York; to name a few. His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Art Forum, The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, among others, and is included in the permanent collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Hirshhorn Museum, and The Jewish Museum in New York.

* * *

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is located in the Lower East Side, at 89 Eldridge Street, just south of Grand Street. For more information, call 212 226 5447 or email: info@invisible-exports.com

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Due out next week, this volume, edited by Lionel Bovier, collects 40 years of writings on the subject of artists' books by one of the world's leading authorities.

"Clive Phillpot has been a tireless advocate for the artist’s book for more than 40 years--both as a critic, curator and editor, and in his tenure as director at the library of The Museum of Modern Art in the late 1970s, where he built the library’s collection of artist’s books and mapped out the field with influential essays that traced its ancestry and distinguished it from seemingly similar genres such as the livre d’artiste. As he has delineated the genre: “Artists’ books are understood to be books or booklets produced by the artist using mass-production methods, and in (theoretically) unlimited numbers, in which the artist documents or realizes art ideas or artworks.” Also collaborating with Printed Matter and Franklin Furnace, among other places dedicated to the medium of the book, Phillpot helped raise awareness of artists’ books, endowing them with the critical credentials to enter the collections of museums. Booktrek gathers for the first time Phillpot’s essays on the definition and development of artists’ books from 1972 to the present--historical texts, manifestos, catalogue entries and essays on works by Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Dieter Roth and Richard Long. Booktrek will prove an invaluable reference for all those interested in the evolution of the artist’s book, and offers a crucial account of the genre’s ascent." - publisher's blurb

The 20th edition by Paul + Wendy Projects (and the fourth by Dumontier, including his collaborations with Micah Lexier and Neil Farber) was announced yesterday. The candle casting a shadow in relief is made of powder-coated steel, with a hand-painted wick.

Based on how quickly the new Typing prints sell, and the 12 hours it took for Dumontier's Nothing Else Press Sock to sell out, I suspect these won't be around for long. Order it here.

John Cage was "composer in residence" at the University of Cincinnati in 1968, when his close friend and sometime collaborator Marcel Duchamp died. A local art patron named Alice Weston approached him about producing a commissioned lithograph, as a memoriam to Duchamp. The project morphed into a series of eight silkscreened “plexigrams” panels, mounted on a wooden base, accompanied by a lithograph.

The texts were created using Cage's usual approach of "chance operations", though stories on the method differ. Some accounts have Cage consulting the I Ching (which he used regularly as a compositional tool) and others indicate that it was the 1955 edition of The American Dictionary and tossed coins that were used to yield the words, placement and typefaces. Cage collaborated with Calvin Sumsion, an artist, designer, and visual communications consultant, whose signature also appears on the work. Chance extends into the buyers' eventual display of the work, with the intention that the panels be placed in a different order each time the work is shown.

The title comes from another of Cage's friends, Jasper Johns. "I had been asked by one of the magazines to do something for Marcel," he wrote. "I had just before heard Jap say 'I don't want to say anything about Marcel,' because they had asked him to say something about Marcel in the magazine, too. So I called both the Plexigrams and the lithographs, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, quoting Jap without saying so."

The work is enclosed in a black box which measures 38 x 62.5 x 5 cm. and is accompanied by a text by Cage which describes his compositional method for creating the work.

Friday, August 23, 2013

A couple of weeks ago we visited the Claes Oldenburg show at the MOMA, but reluctantly adhered to the no photography rule (even with Oldenburg himself roaming the exhibition). But the MOMA website has just given me accreditation (clearly their standards aren't high) so that I can access their hi-res press photos. So here are a few of the Mouse Museum, one of the highlights. Their site doesn't have pictures from within the Ray Gun Museum, which is even better.

Also, an image of one of the glass cases containing works that Oldenburg made and offered for sale at The Store, a key moment in the history of the Artists' Multiple.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Toronto's Magic Pony just launched a new website earlier this week, which includes a page for multiples, which features items such as the below cacti by Shannon Gerard. Their stock of toys, clothing, designer goods, jewelry, books and artworks also includes items by Micah Lexier, Michael Dumontier, Neil Farber, Lawrence Weiner, David Shrigley and Marcel Dzama.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.